Here’s a picture of some objects from the Icklingham hoard, on display in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. You might be surprised to see glass beads – could these really be prized possessions, valuable enough to be hoarded alongside gold and silver?
It’s also intriguing that at first sight, some of the more colourful glass beads look like the kind found in the Anglo-Saxon period – they aren’t typical of Roman beads. A bit of investigation, though, shows they are types that occur in the late Roman period as well – at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, the same as the dates of the latest coins in this hoard. A workshop making beads that look like this is known in the Rhineland of Germany.
If you look closely at the dark blue ‘cornerless cube’ beads, you might notice what looks like a figure-of-eight design engraved into the surface of one of them. The bead collector Horace Beck, who once owned the artefacts from the hoard, identified a parallel from Gotland, an island that today belongs to Sweden. But does that mean this unusual bead originated there? A few other examples we have tracked down come from surprisingly disparate locations – Poland, Romania, and Switzerland.
The status of the beads as exotic objects in a Romano-British context might explain their value in this hoard. We’re searching for more evidence, though – especially for the engraved ‘cornerless cube’ bead. If you’ve ever seen anything like it among archaeological finds, please let us know!